2024 Family Summer Bucket List + FREE Printable

It's the last day of school and the unofficial start of summer for our family! To celebrate, we spent some time this week creating our annual Summer Bucket List!

Create your own Summer Bucket List with my FREE Printable

As a to-do list fan I love the bullet notes and calendar space so you can think how to schedule everything 😉

For the past several years, we've used this template for our Summer Bucket List with great success. It helps us narrow down our ideas and plan our activities monthly, making the whole summer feel more manageable. Breaking it into monthly segments keeps it from becoming overwhelming. Our Summer Bucket Lists (2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013) have not only created countless great memories but have also established several family traditions.

Let's dive into this year's list! Each month, we prioritize a few key activities. In June, we look forward to our annual Iowa Ice Cream Road Trip and a yurt camping trip with friends. July will be busy with preparations for and exhibiting at the Franklin County Fair. New this year, we're excited to host a Sweet Corn Party at the end of July! We'll be inviting our farm landlords and employees for a meal featuring sweet corn, plenty of pork and great fellowship on the farm. To wrap up the summer in August, we're excited for our community VBS, a family vacation and the Iowa State Fair. Our vacation plans aren't finalized yet, but the kids want to spend a weekend in Okoboji, which made this year's list!

Now moving onto the bullets, we are planning to take one of my grandmas, the kids' great-grandmother, to Pella this summer. We love having a Grandma Day Date with her each summer, and this year we wanted to explore the Dutch heritage and cuisine in Pella, Iowa.

I already mentioned that we want to visit Okoboji sometime this summer. The kids made a special note that they want to go to Arnold's Park to ride the rides. Last year, we tried an escape room in town but ran out of time before completing all of the tasks. This year, they are eager to try another escape room and finish it in time!

Last year, we had a Family Cake War where each kid made and decorated their own cake and my husband was the judge. They had so much fun that they want to do it again, and they want to do it around our dear friend and neighbor's birthday, like last year, so he can come over for lots of birthday cake!

Camping for our family means tenting in our backyard and going yurting. Maybe we'll try camping somewhere else too! One activity making a return is having reading picnics, where we grab stacks of books, lay out some blankets and read outside.

Of course, swimming is on the list, and hopefully, we can get some swimming in at the lake and the pool. The kids also think our family picture in our living room is really old, so they suggested we take a new one. It probably is a few years old already and it's amazing how much the kids have grown.

What's on your summer bucket list?  Do you have any recommendations to help us complete ours?